"In America, the accommodation of Western historical consciousness to racial ideologies created a particular chain of social misperceptions and historical distortions that endured into the present century. Not only was popular thought affected but the very foundations of that American academic thought which first began to mature in the nineteenth century was suffused with racialist presuppositions."

-- Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, p. 76

This workshop opens an occasion to think the question of “rhetoric” and what its study might be or entail in relation to the historical and ongoing practices, and the social, ontological, and epistemic effects of and demands fostered through settler colonization, trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, and genocide in a global frame.

Without wishing to presume that we understand what rhetoric “is”—and perhaps “rhetoric” occasions the study of objects or practices as social and linguistic forms, as effects of linguistic practices, rather than as “things” that “are”—this workshop wonders what happens in the social, and in collective practice of thought, when we cease asking about what “is,” and when we cease wondering about about “origins” and “causes,” and when we tune in to the social and historical experience and modes of knowing of living beings, collectivities, and communities?

This workshop takes as a starting point a refusal of the law, the state, and the social form of the individual and its rights--a field of terms that have always been racialized, anti-Black, settler-colonial, and socially obliterating; a refusal of the coercive epistemic, social, and ontological terms of the university and its normative disciplines; a refusal of the white supremacy and the settler-colonial and carceral terms that continue to authorize normative modes of work, relation, sociality, and being; and a refusal of the plantation-centric social, epistemic, and relational modes we are coerced—differently and asymmetrically—to at least partially inhabit.

This workshop asks, in this frame: what modes of being, life, and knowing does the university--as it is presently constituted and organized--sustain, generalize, and proliferate? What modes of being, life, and knowing does it destroy, obliterate, or render destitute? Can there be a thinking of the university in a wholly other manner? How might we collectively enliven this thinking? How might "rhetoric" become an occasion for this "other" collective doing in thought, in the social, and in epistemic form and life?

Presenters include:

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi
Donatella Galella
Jennifer Najera
Wesley Leonard
Jacques Lezra
Sahin Acikgoz
Rana Sharif

Moderated by Jeff Sacks